Day two of Corroboree Comp

After such a hard day on Day One and knowing the barra (who love the early dawn stripped surface fly) were not much about (only two caught on Day One by 25+ fly fishers) and the saratoga getting more active later in day (well so we convinced ourselves for our lack of them on Day One).......
We slept in till 7am - an hour and half after first light.

I usually like to be on the water before the sun gets up or even peeks across the edge of the horizon - but it was a very long hard day on Day One. And better yet - it felt really good to sleep in for a change!

We also had electric motors issues with the battery dying late in Day One - I did get three year's use out of it, but one more day would have been nice! So alas for Day Two no electric motor!
So we needed wind to push us along the edge of the lilies as we cast into them, without having to use the main engine too much and getting up later would give the wind time to get blowing.

We had a couple of awesome wind drifts at a perfect casting distance from lilies, drifting along 300-400 metres of lilies at the edges of the billabongs water stretches.

On the first drift we picked up a tarpon or two, promising but we wanted Saratoga!

We swapped sides of the waterway we were drifting to a more grassy rather than lily dominated section that was poking out into the main water - it screamed fish. On many other trips it would have held fish but given the lack of action Day one - I was hoping it would rather than knowing it would.

I laid a good cast a couple of metres past the point to the grass growing out of the water, let it sink for a few seconds and proceeded to strip in the line in a stop start pause retrieve.
Just after the fly past the tip of the grass growth, I get that typical take of a saratoga but it goes crazy. Rolling instantly on tension with the fly and the fly hook point didn't get enough purchase as it flipped and turned dislodging the fly easily - and went back to the depths of the weeds.

Bugger! At least we almost had one, which raised our hopes for the day
Fly fishers are like that - any little thing to get us casting and concentrating
How many times have you caught nothing for hours and on the last cast before you head somewhere else - one little flash or fly tail strike gets you all hyped up, enthused and casting for another hour!

On our second and best wind drift - we cast and cast and cast - deep into the lilies and I mean deep with weed guarded flies - in the back of the lilies the fly would be hanging over lilies and out of the water as much as it was it the water
We saw rolls, even had a few follows
I had another that tossed the hook - Bugger!! again!!

Near the end of this second drift, Peter (the deckie) lost one - a good one!
And then a couple of casts later got one at 59cm - things were looking even better!
It is so great to see that broad flank and pink spots, the fight is strong and deep but also at times some short flips and jumps on the surface. You feel that strength pulsing the rod - this is what it is all about!

That this saratoga in the net made us hand slappingly excited was an understatement with the first of the target fish for the comp in the net.

I had been using a rabbit fur fly in the same colourings as Peter but a little bigger and bulkier
but I changed flies over instantly to the fly Peter was using
A size 2 fly with small bead chain eyes, orange hackle collar and black fake fur tail - simple but today very very effective give the lack of fish caught over the whole competition.

We had another at 57cm shortly after (well Peter caught it but I netted it! ) - this one fought much harder and seem in the net over 60cm because of of its deeper thicker shoulder section but the brag mat doesn't lie - 57cm it was

Peter had another few missed hook ups, me with much less casting - had one missed hookup too -
Things were now looking grim.

Competition score cards had to be in by 1:30pm on Day Two - so with two hours left in the day before we had to get the boat out of the water - we went after some tarpon as they were the species drawn out of the hat the night before for the multiple points species. Every centimetre of a tarpon was worth triple points on Day Two. (It was catfish on Day One.) So we thought to get some easy triple points with five 20+cm tarpon in an hour and then for last hour try for some more Saratoga.

We went back up that little backwater next to the boat ramp and again the tarpon were there rolling and boiling as much as the previous afternoon - but a few less given it was a few hours earlier than yesterday.

The first few tarpon to hand were the same sizes as yesterday. But in a little side bay not bigger than a single car garage surrounded by lilies and grass - we hit a patch of bigger tarpon. Peters first one was well over 30cm and while every second cast was a smaller tarpon - you knew when you got one of the bigger ones which provided a decent full bend in the rod, a fly line singingly taunt, and zipping through the water. Lots and lots of fun.

This video clip shows the tarpon spot and some very poor fish handling skills on my part.....
          ..............(though I think personally that the casting is not too bad)

So much for only an hour on the tarpon, as we lost track of time - always casting for a larger tarpon used up our time and energy. By 1pm we were done and no more of anything left for saratoga. So we pulled the boat out and started to pack up camp before the awards ceremony began.

Peter had had a good comp so might run a place but it all depended on how other fly fishers had gone.
Three more barra were caught across all the competitors (I had heard that the previous weekend comp of the Darwin Fly Rodders also had only a few barra caught - something that should be investigated). As for the saratoga for Day Two - only eight toga were caught (2 of whom were Peter's and all from only 10 or so boats) - while most fly fishers got their quota of five tarpon. While bigger ones were caught by others, Peter's tarpon ranged from 39-25cm and his saratoga were in the second highest points category due to their size - so he was in with a good chance of ending in the top few fly fishers for the competition. And so he should have as he was always casting, again and again - and it paid off in point scoring fish.

As the scorers shared the stats of what was caught on Day Two with us, we both commiserated about the 6 missed saratoga fish that day.
Peter deservedly ended up coming third overall and only two saratoga fish worth of points from first place (bugger those missed fish!!!).

Well done Peter! - (but don't forget the guy who nets the fish!)  

While it was hard fishing wise over the two days with lots and lots of casts between fish  - we both agreed it was a great couple of days. We had to work out how to catch the fish that were shut down and hard to find - and did so to a degree. But if it hadn't been for the 15+ metres of baby tarpon caught Day One - would we have said the same?

So whats next for the Swoffer of Northern Waters...........

•    New battery for electric
•    Wiring up new battery so that the motor can charge it
•  just ordered a Cole Hersee rotary battery master switch for the purpose
•    Check out the tiny leak and where it is coming from
•    Fix radio wiring and get the code I need to start using it

This weekend is also looking good with great for tides and little predicted wind for Sunday
Additionally, there is a hope for a planned trip to Peron Islands early June
Also a trip to Vernon Islands once Peter gets his first but bigger than my boat for chasing mackerel and tuna offshore

There has been talk of longtail tuna right up in the harbour I would like to investigate
There is West Arm to explore and work out the barra and other species in it

More fish, more places - so little time!
And more flies to tie!!!!

See you on the water

Lots to catch you up on........(day one Corroboree Comp)

Firstly the steering cable was not the right size - ^%#%^(*^^&$
    despite me following the manufacturers diagram and instructions on measuring

it was 6 inches too small (what my wife always says!!!!)

But by not placing the cable under the gunnel completely - it fitted, it not tightly!
Whew! buying overseas is cheaper and quicker in Darwin then getting it from the east coast or local but returning the incorrectly ordered item is quite complicated if not impossible!

So I get the boat and camping stuff ready for the NT Fly Fishers Social Mob competition at Corroboree Billabong
I wanted to fish last weekend at the NT Fly Rodders comp too, but painting fence posts on my rural block to earn some extra brownie points for a saltwater trip to Peron Islands late May and putting in the steering cable into the boat took precedent

The Monday of the week before the Social mob comp, things looked good for fishing (see The dry is here) with 8 toga being caught and plenty attacking the fly for one Social Mob member. So all looked very promising for the fishing on the weekend of the comp.
I had always fished this billabong well, while not for barra, the toga were in fear of me! (haha)-
I got 22 in one day leading up to a comp in previous years, the best 84cm of deep slab bodied thick shouldered beauty and power. I had also won a few fly rods at past freshwater comps for the biggest tarpon. To say I was confident of catching fish, was to mitigate my expectations of the trip.
My Deckie came second last year, so we both expected to do well.

I wanted to head out Friday arvo to set up camp and settle in for the weekend
But the wife (even though I had this planned for months) went to a school concert friday night after giving me no notice
This saw me leaving at 4am Saturday morning to get out to Corroboree Tavern by 5:30 to drop off the camper trailer of my deckie who followed me out that morning from town and get onto the water by 6am just before first light for hopefully some topwater action before the sun drove the fish deeper

It was cool temperature wise to say the least and when flat out to a spot very chilling indeed - well before the sun got up anyway. Then it was sun beating down and the constant sweat rolling down the small of your back

First spot we went to same starting spot as over the last few years, which had previously seen 30-40cm togas on the tip sections of a lily vines reaching out into the billabongs and the bigger toga (50+) towards the back of the lilies. at times small barra would be in there too. Previous comps I had picked up up to 15 toga from this 300m stretch leading to a backwater area I would fish mid morning to midday,

But not this first morning, lots of casts for not much. just a few tugs on fly tail tips by small tarpon
the lilies were growing much further into the billabongs than previous years - most likely due to the 300mm less than average rainfall this wet season

Something else seemed off too.............
Was it the not as many baby tarpon rolling and boiling the surface around you. Previous years every time you stripped in those final few meters of line to recast you would have a flashing tarpon attacking the fly
But the tarpon were conspicuous due to their absence of numbers and aggression towards our flies - let alone the apparently absent saratoga as well

It was a tough first day, lots of casts for not much for most of the day
I dropped one nice toga who flipped over the fly on strip strike and rolled off the hook
(due to a lack of recent experience hooking fish??? not fishing in the last 4months maybe)
The deckie lost a few more the same way (these misses would prove crucial at end of comp!)

We did catch some bigger than normal (a normal tarpon averages 16-20cm for the billabong) my best was 39cm for the day, though a couple of houseboaters trolling lures the middle of the main billabong got two at 50-60cm - not bad for freshwater tarpon in the billabongs.


Interestingly, the larger tarpon we were catching were in places previously we had caught saratoga. You would cast in between lillie pads, deep into the shadows of some Pandanus trees fully expecting a toga to take your fly

You let the fly sinking deeper and during first strip come up tight to a fish. You would be expecting a toga from such locations and the fishing rolling around on the end of your leader although fighting hard - had a forked tail and was all silver as opposed to a togas round tail and pink spots. They fight so different to a saratoga, so you know its not a toga within a few seconds after hook up - then comes the disappointment

We shifted around to find the fish (as were all the competitors) but the targeted fish were not cooperating

One of the other competitors who had fished the billabongs in Kakadu for 13 plus years said he had never seen such hard fishing.

Just before lines in for the day's competition, we motored back to the boat ramp and ventured up a backwater - almost totally entrapped in lilies

It took us about 5 minutes to putter into the back water of Marrikia lagoon through a narrow gap in the lilies. and not a fish to be seen despite repeated cast after cast in to likely spots amongst the lilies. there were a few other boats in the backwater who experienced the same thing.
(But the two who eventually won the comp were in there for most of the morning.)

After that fruitless journey, we went back to the boat ramp and went up the small canal near the ramp - told it eventually leads to Hardies lagoon.
About 70metres into it the tarpon were going nuts, the entire water's surface and the edges of the lilies was a mass of boiling and bubbling tarpon for the next two hundred meters - most were 10-20 cms with a few larger ones mingled in.

After such a crazy hard fishing day for not much result, we needed to catch something and a lot of them
So we switched to very light leaders and size 4 skeletal anorexic clousers and began catching a fish almost every cast. We (that is the deckie) had only a few of these flies so when a hook broke after countless removals from the mouths of baby tarpon, we despaired at our dwindling supply of  these tiny flies. The tarpon stripped the materials off those flies to just a bit of thread and small bead chain eyes on a hook and they still ate the fly with gusto!
We racked up a cricket score of baby tarpon - not worrying that we could only have our five biggest tarpon on the scoresheet for the comp - we competed with each other - by adding the centimetres of each fish together as we caught them - in a little over an hour the deckie got 5.33m of tarpon and I got 6.15m. however, his five largest fish overall for the day saw him with more points on the comp scoreboard.
Adding the larger tarpon caught earlier in the day (from typical saratoga spots = see earlier in this blog) - together we caught well over 15 meters of tarpon for the day - not too bad for a hard fishing day - the problem was no saratoga or barra - the high scoring fishing for the comp

More so than previous trips, throughout the day we had several encounters with crocodiles all between the 3-4.5m length. See bottom right side of pic below. This guy's head alone was just under a metre long and he had little fear of our boat as it approached.

however, most of the crocs subtly sunk/slunk into the depths as we approached, leaving a small bubble trail to indicate their underwater escape path

But you never see all that were there - once we were fishing to entrance to the channel to Palm Lagoon and around us you could here the constant honking of the magpie geese on their nests just beyond the first layers of grass and lilies. One mother goose decided to shift house after the young had hatched.

The mother goose flew across the channel leading to Palm Lagoon and was calling her babies chicks to follow her
They came chirping across the 4m wide channel and I commented to Peter (the deckie) on the day or two old geese swimming madly across the water not 6 or so metres from us. He commented on they were lucky a croc wasn't there to eat them. However, as he said it - this 4m crocodile raised itself like a submarine from the weeds lilies and water, moved forward a metre or so and with one large jaw snapping swipe had one, then with a slight turn and another snap - it had the other, and as quickly as it had arisen it faded back into the depths with hardly a ripple on the surface. I had already filled the SM card of my head cam, so disappointingly had missed filming the whole scenario. In recent weeks I had been watching video clips of Northern hemisphere pike take ducklings and ducks but this left them all for its subtleness and vicious finality of this croc vs duckling episode.

We also had a encounter with one of the largest crocs I have seen in the wild. We were cruising about looking for fish and up on the bank in the sun was this beast of a croc at least 1.5m wide in the guts and probably 70cm high while resting on the bank, its head was huge.  I have a 4.75m boat and it was far bigger in length then the boat. It would have been easily well over 5m, if not closer to or over 6m.

While Peter was filming it, I clapped my hand to see if it was alive and as big as it was it moved with lightning speed to spin around and plunge into the water. As soon as it hit the water I hit the throttle to get the hell out of there! Great to watch but I didn't want to be there if it thought my casting deck was a good place to sun itself! or it wanted payback for ruining its sun baking time. There was also a 4.5m near it in the water that was dwarfed by the bigger croc and a 3 footer that was in the grass onshore slipped into the water too as the big croc splashed into the water (see video right hand side).

After a very early start that morning we headed back to camp to hand in our scoresheets. as for the other fly fishers - not many toga caught, only two barra, most got some tarpon or two, a catfish (which was the bonus fish for the day worth multiple times the actual centimeter length).

The special meal for the competitors that night was awesome to say the least. For a pub meal, it was as good as any restaurant in town.
Presentation, taste, and ambiance of the very highest levels - a perfect scotch fillet and vegies, dessert also was classy and delicious.

During the meal all of us commiserated and swapped notes on our feeble attempts to outwit a fish with the brain  the size of your thumb tip.
Many kept talking and drinking till late but I was trashed after such a long hard day - and especially since I hadn't done any fishing for several months due to crook boats and other reasons - so left just after the meal and as soon as my head hit the pillow I was out to all but the world ending!

Day two coming soon! stay online!

also see the NT Fly Fishers Social Mod blog of the event 



  

20141019 - Lee Point Trip Report

So was given Sunday morning off (again!)
And as much as I whinge about my wife she does let me go fishing quite a lot!

So just before 6am saw us launching at Nightcliff Boat Ramp
Just launched! As still quite shallow at the end of ramp when we launched given low tide in a little over three hours at 9:35am.

The wind was only slight, from north-east but predicted to increase at midday
We headed for Lee Point for the couple of hours we had

As soon as we arrived birds were working the edges of the reef lines running east west across the front of Lee Point land based rocks.
We were hooked up multiple times in a short period of time

Tarpon, Trevally, Queenfish and Mackerel were all mixed in  together -  creating a lucky dip to what would come the boat. the tarpon were most enjoyable, Having not caught them in the harbour since I got a few landbased off east point to 63cm on surface poppers a few years ago, it was nice to get into some very fit, thick shouldered tarpon - man are they good fighters for their size!!

Large shoals of baitfish were working their way through from the harbour proper towards Shoal Bay. The east west parallel reefs that are evenly spaced in line with Lee Point land based rocks funnel the baitfish and concentrate them making them easier targets for the pelagics.

While there were bust ups all over the place, we found one spot where the they were regularly attacking the baitfish - the large number of birds above this action helped us know exactly where they were.

We had some 50cm queenies get almost eaten by some monster fish while getting them in. Once a trevally of at least a metre and another time a metre plus cod (see video for brown blur of Cod as it swiped at the queenie).

We were into fish or chasing fish for most of the the few hours we were at Lee Point.
A great morning of SWOFFING indeed

The Mackerel were bigger too (well than previous trips anyway).
Here's Peter with of the better one's, he got this one on a tube fly with a trailing stinger hook.

On getting back to  Nightcliff ramp around midday - the water was still fairly low. So much so the boat before us once on it's trailer could not get up the ramp and had to dump itself back into the water to wait on the rising tide.

Given the flat end of the ramp, even I had to put most of my ute into the water to get my boat on - at least I had four wheel drive to get it up over the edge of ramp (unlike the previous boat which was twice my size and only a two wheel drive light ute to tow it!)

we were happy to be off the water as the wind was now absolutely howling from the NW, outside the shelter of the small rock jetty at the ramp white caps were everywhere. It would have quite unpleasant out there in my low profile Stessl Protracker

It had been a really fun morning trip with heaps of fish caught, lots of double hook ups and a varitey of species coming to hand. Surface and subsurface flies used - mostly silicone surf candies by me (no epoxy like a normal surf candy, just a thin layer of clear silicone over hook shank and tail material tie in point, with prism eyes added and a few layers of nail polish to give it a crisp scale/shell like feel to crunch of fish teeth)

Bring on the next trip!  (got to do those gold bomber tying instructions blog, promise - soon!)

*********

10min summary video of what happened for the trip